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Given the price of pine nuts (pignoli), these cookies wouldn’t really be in the budget recipe category. BUT…they take no time at all to prepare and they’re so good that when you take into account what your time is worth, making these is a BARGAIN! (If you live near a Costco in the U.S., they […]

Dessert, Gluten Free, Recipes

Pignoli Cookies

Pignoli Cookies

Pan fried chicken cutlet, similar to fried Austrian wiener schnitzel, is a simple and traditional plate found all over Italy. I  prefer this oven cooked version to the traditional one as it’s lighter and healthier –  then you can enjoy the recipe more than once a week!  Perfect as a second course and ideal with roasted or fried potatoes […]

Foods Kids Love, Main Dish, Recipes

Oven Fried Chicken alla Milanese

Chicken alla Milanese

My friend Sal is a terrific cook – let me correct myself…he’s an exceptional, awesome and outstanding cook! He’s one of those laid back suburban, golfing, kind of guys who not only knows his way around a kitchen, but when he’s in it, amazing things happen. The second oldest of 5 brothers whose parents were […]

Pasta, Recipes

Bolognese alla Salvatore (Sal’s Bolognese)

Bolognese alla Salvatore

Here in the Veneto, we celebrate the Epiphany with an ages old traditional bonfire called “panevin”. “Pan e vin” is local dialect which means “pane e vino” in Italian, and  “bread and wine” in English. The origins of panevin are rooted in the Christian faith and the belief is that bonfires were made to light the way for the Three Kings while […]

Holidays, Travel

Pan e Vin (6th January)-Celebrating the Epiphany

Panevin in Montebelluna

Chilly and rainy outside but warm and bright inside, Caffe Club was a beacon of happiness on an otherwise miserably wet Sunday afternoon.  And we got to see first hand how tramezzini are made at this delightful neighborhood bar owned by lovely Lorella and her charming husband Giorgio. Tramezzini (or tramezzino, singular) are the most […]

Travel

Tramezzini in Montebelluna

Caffe Club

Wild Mushroom Soup with Toasted Croutons   Print Using a mix of mushrooms adds character to the flavor of the soup. The nail-shaped Chiodini mushroom (“chiodo” means nail in Italian) grows around the bases of trees on the Montello hillside in the province of Treviso. The Chiodini season lasts only two months-September and October. This […]

Recipes, Soup

Wild Mushroom Soup with Toasted Croutons

Wild Mushroom Soup

Linguine with Roasted Butternut Squash, Walnuts and Fresh Sage   Print Butternut squash is abundant in the fall and this pasta with butternut squash, tossed with extra virgin olive oil and roasted, is truly amazing. Here’s a recipe that takes maybe 30 minutes from start to finish…really. And you can shave 5 minutes off that […]

Pasta, Recipes

Linguine with Roasted Butternut Squash, Walnuts and Fresh Sage

Linguine with Butternut Squash, Walnuts and Fresh Sage

I looked at the waiter with utter confusion- I had no idea what he just said to me. Was he telling me the specials? Or that they were out of the chicken? Maybe that they only took cash? I had a pretty decent handle on a couple of languages…but Italian wasn’t one of them.  And […]

Hints, Travel

Learning Italian

Italian Books

Recently I was asked, and happily accepted, to do some cooking and baking at a relatives’s house for their pre-wedding party. It was absolutely my pleasure and since I was flying in for the occasion, I couldn’t bring any of my own kitchen tools (for some reason the TSA frowns at sharp knives in your […]

Hints

Top Ten Most Important Kitchen Items (According to Me)

Top Ten Kitchen Items

I consider myself a somewhat lazy cook; not in a bad way like lacking in effort but in a good way like if there’s a reasonable shortcut to a recipe that doesn’t really compromise the look and taste, that’s me! Like most everyone, time is sometimes hard to find and it’s that cost benefit thing […]

Dessert, Recipes

Peach and Blueberry Crostada

Blueberry Peach Crostada

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